Recent research has documented that income inequality in the United States has increased dramatically over the prior three decades. There has been less of a consensus, however, on whether the increase in income inequality was matched by an equally large increase in consumption inequality. Most researchers have studied this question using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE)

...All of our different methods yield similar results. We find that consumption inequality within the U.S. between 1980 and 2010 has increased by nearly the same amount as income inequality